Tuesday, May 27, 2008

"The man who resurrected the nation's favorite timelord (sic), reinvented him and bequeathed him to future generations of slightly inadequate men and women to obsess over once again, has stepped down...."

Saturday, May 24, 2008

A strange, disconnected world in which vaguely camp characters, indistinguishable and without backstories, come in and go off without being properly developed, and periodically burst into song: I suppose, given that RTD's first love is Buffy, it was inevitable that sooner or later he would attempt to make an episode of Torchwood in the style of "Once More With Feeling."

Davies also has a bad habit of taking Very Good "Big Finish" stories -- "Jubilee", "Fires of Vulcan", "Spare Parts" and turning them into Not Quite So Good TV episodes -- "Dalek", "Fires of Pompeii", "Rise of the Cybermen." Gareth Roberts classic "Bang-Bang-A-Boom" is set on a space craft ("Dark Space 5") during an intergalactic song contest: transferring the action to Belgrade and making all the contestants human seems to remove the episode's central point.

The extremely tight filming schedules required by new Doctor Who has required that Season 2 and Season 3 both included episodes in which the Doctor played a relatively minor role. And of course, in the Very Old Days, actors had to occasionally have time off: Bill Hartnell missed part 4 of "Dalek Invasion Earth"; and during "The Mind Robber", Fraser Hines famously mislaid his face causing Jamie to go down with chickenpox, or possibly vice versa. But tonight's episode cleverly references "Mission to the Unknown" in that none of the regular characters appear. Presumably, the Irish Space Agent who is the only recurrent character has sent an SOS message that will be picked up by the TARDIS in the next story but one...

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

And the award for "Silliest episode of Doctor Who excluding those in which the villain is made of Liquorice Allsorts" goes to...

The Doctor goes back to the 1920s and meets Agatha Christie. Fine.

The Doctor finds that Agatha Christie is embroiled in an Agatha Christie mystery. OK: roughly what we'd expect.

The Agatha Christie story in which Agatha Christie is embroiled isn't an actual Agatha Christie story: it's a BBC adaptation of an Agatha Christie story, full of televisual devices like flashbacks and scenes from the P.O.V of the murderer.

I'm a Holmes man, myself, but didn't actual Christie stories take place on exotic locations like the Nile, the Orient Express, the Clouds and so on? And weren't her actual characters rather less generic than Nervous Country Clergyman and Stiff Lipped Anglo Indian? Isn't this, in fact, Agatha Christie as imagined by people who haven't actually read many many Agatha Christie stories, pretty much as last week was Doctor Who as remembered by people who haven't actually seen many Doctor Who stories? I mean, the opening scene: Prof. Peach is murdered in the library with the lead piping. That's not from Christie; that's from a board game that was a parody of Agatha Christie. First published 1949.

But this isn't even Agatha Christie embroiled in a TV adaptation of a parody of an Agatha Christie novel: this is Agatha Christie embroiled in a TV adaptation of a parody of an Agatha Christie novel in which an evil shape shifting alien is deliberately and consciously acting out an Agatha Christie story. But it's more complicated than that: this fictitious alien-organized murder-mystery party is the explanation of the real mystery of why Agatha Christie disappeared for a fortnight in 1926. And it also turns out that's the place where she got the ideas for many of her best stories.

In short: what we have here is yet another example of Doctor Who chasing it's tail round and round in ever decreasing circles and eventually disappearing up its own eye of harmony.

There's no mystery about Agatha Christie's disappearance. She ran away because she was distressed after learning that her husband had got a young woman pregnant, although, in his defense, he always claimed that it was the policeman who did it.

We all miss you, Humph.

I found the solution to the metafictional mystery, which involved an evil shape shifting alien insect, only slightly more unsatisfactory than one of Christie's own. But that may very well have been the point.

No West End Theater manager today would consider staging a three act whodunit; such things are purely the province of church hall amateur theatrical societies. The Mouse Trap is not even especially good of it's kind: I'm told by people who know that Ten Little Wassissnames is a much better example of the genre. Yet The Mouse Trap limps on for forty, fifty, sixty years, famous for being famous, a mummified relic of the way theater used to be half a century ago. Christie's stories are not rooted in police procedure, or forensics, or logical deduction, or a particularly subtle understanding of character. Her twists endings surprise us; not because of what they say about the real world or her imagined world, but because they break the rules of the detective genre. The corpse dunit. The first person narrator dunit. The detective dunit. Everybody dunit. No-body dunit.

The analogy between Agatha Christie and Doctor Who is left as an exercise for the reader.

This Saturday's 6.45 slot was given over to a publicity video for a proposed new sci-fi series Jenny: Defender of the Universe.

This isn't the first time RTD has tried to launch such a spin-off series. There's been Rose Tyler: Defender of the Earth which sadly never made it to the screen and Torchwood which sadly did.

The "Doctor's Daughter" didn't give us much of a clue as to what Jenny is going to be about but then "The Doctor Dances" and "Bad Wolf" didn't give us many clues about the dreadful Torchwood. The whole point of the episode is to introduce Jenny and persuade us to like her.

It's a clever publicity stunt. The title of the episode is a blatant lie and the secular press fell for it hook, line and sinker. Davies said that the story would "do exactly what it said on the tin", and everyone bought into the idea that a story called "The Doctor's Daughter" would be about a girl who was, er, the daughter of the Doctor. Now, I'm no fan of big revelations about the Doctor's past. Second-rate writers may get a brief buzz if they think that, with a stroke of the pen, they can change the nature of a long-established character and constrain what writers yet unborn will be able to do with them, but it's usually a bad idea. It usually leaves the Great Character less interesting than he was before you started fiddling. However, I cannot deny that a revelation that the Doctor has living relatives would have been interesting. But we haven't got to the end of the pre-cred before we've been told that absolutely nothing interesting has happened at all. Jenny is simply a clone, the Doctor's daughter in exactly the same way that Evil Sontaran Replicant was Martha's Daughter. (Less so, actually, because E.S.R shared some of Martha's memories.)

By lying about the basic set-up, Davies has made everyone in the whole wide world switch on. He is clearly hoping that Georgia Mofett's winning smile will prevent some of them from turning off when they find they've been hoaxed. We're supposed to love Jenny, not because she's the Doctor's Daughter, but just because she's Jenny. She is not bad looking. She smiles a lot. She has that tomboyish eagerness that you usually find in people who are about to dress up as a boy and disappear to another part of the forest (pursued by a bear.) She refrains from slapping her thighs. She does acrobatics. She isn't as pretty as Sarah Michelle Geller. She clearly expects words like "fiesty", "spunky" and "vaguely irritating" to be applied to her. But I'm afraid I don't instantly love her. (The thing which really worked about Season 1 is that, regardless of what you may personally think about Rose Tyler you could absolutely see what the Doctor saw in her. In this case, I can't.)

But, very, very cleverly, we are manipulated into liking Jenny more than she deserves. First of all, every other character in the story is fantastically dull. Martha spends most of the story having one sided conversations with a fish; and the rest of the supporting cast are the kind of plucky but misguided warriors who've been running up and down corridors since 1963. Despite having made such a song and dance about the TARDIS translation circuits in "Fires of Pompeii", the fish-people can only communicate with Martha in gurgles. If they'd have been given any actual dialogue, they might have become interesting and distracted our attention away from Jenny.

Secondly, the foreground plot is the most generically old-style Who story since the series returned. If "Sontaran Stratagem" (*) is a 1972 story, "The Doctor's Daughter" is in all respects a Graham Williams era run-around. Human and alien colonists locked in a genocidal war; aliens that look like refugees from the Muppet Show; a brief expedition across a quarry; a surprise revelation that no-one really believes a word of. Maroon Romana with the Hath and let K-9 spot the significance of the writing on the wall and the story would fit neatly between "Creature from the Pit" and "Nightmare of Eden". So, of course, the casual viewer – Donna's Mum, say, -- filters it out. Oh yes, Doctor Who was that programme in which spacemen and aliens ran up and down corridors for reasons which I didn't understand. Let's ignore them and concentrate on Wonderful Jenny.

And for those of us who are paying attention, the foreground story is really, really dull. Donna solves a number code which doesn't actually make much difference. The Doctor goes on and on about how war is good for absolutely nothing. Martha bonds with a kipper. RTD has previously served up stories which are silly, impenetrable, corny, campy and vulgar: this is the first time he's actively bored me. Again, I assume that this is intentional. The story is so un-interesting that it appears to brighten up every time Little Miss Sunshine hoves into view.

The real story is another take on last week's "family good, soldiers bad" routine, with another dollop of "express your emotions." The Doctor denies the importance of family because he doesn't think that mere genetics creates any special bond between him and Jenny; Donna, who knows that family is all shows him that he is Wrong. She does this by demonstrating that Jenny, like the Doctor, has two hearts: this physiological similarity trumps the Doctor's perfectly reasonable claim that it's shared knowledge, history and culture that makes someone a Time Lord. Donna is proved right. Jenny, even though she was not raised by the Doctor and has no background in common with him, turns out to share a number of his characteristics. Genetic determinism; nature over nurture; blood will out.

"How can you call me English? I don't speak English, I don't know English history, I've never lived in England, I've never eaten a crumpet and I don't like tea."

"But dammit man, you've got a genetically inborn sense of fair play and mores the point white skin."

The Doctor also denies his own emotions claiming that since his own family were killed in the Time War, his capacity to bond emotionally has been shut down. Donna, again, tells him directly that he is wrong, and she is proved to be correct. When Jenny dies (having been offered a place on the TARDIS and thus become subject to The Curse of Kylie) the Doctor weeps – showing that is still capable of being Time Daddy after all.

When the Fish – who Martha has known for about three quarters of an hour – drowns, Martha doesn't have a sniffle, she has a bloody good cry. A person who was that emotionally incontinent would not be able to function as a soldier or a medic, any more than a person who was squicked by poo and vomit could function as a hospital janitor. But to be a hero or heroine, histrionic emotional displays are mandatory. It's worth comparing this post-Diana bullshit with the genuinely moving scene from "Tomb of the Cybermen", in which Doctor Pat helped Victoria deal with the death of her parents. He can still remember his family, he says but he has to really want to before he can bring them back in front of his eyes. "The rest of the time, they sleep in my mind and I forget." How very mature. How very British. We'd better cure you of that.

We are, clearly, supposed to share the Doctor's grief when Jenny is killed, and, in a sort of E.T moment, will her to come back to life. (She's a Time Lord, sort of, so we hope that she can regenerate.) We are supposed to be overjoyed when she wakes up. The final scene in which she flies off into space is meant to be so joyous as to get her first series commissioned by the sheer "Last of the Time Lords" power of feel-good energy alone. I didn't.

Still, it could have been worse. After we found out that the war had been going on for a week (seven days) and after we found the Sauce (a big globule of terraformy stuff) in a temple that was full of plants and trees like, you know, a garden, I had this terrible premonition that Jenny was going to announce that her real name was Eve.

Had it not been quite so obvious, this ending would have felt like another big cheat. Granted the existence of green goo that turns barren planets into a populable ones, why does inhaling green goo necessarily repair a gunshot wounds? Who cares? I don't. Russell Davies doesn't. Move on.

"It can be terrifying, brilliant and funny, sometimes all at the same time", Yeah. I remember when Doctor Who used to be like that, too.

(*) Do two parters have their own titles, or should we refer to them by the title of the first episode, like "The Dead Planet" and "The Nightmare Begins"?

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Militaristic aliens in flying saucers invading earth using a plan that's five times more complicated that it needs to be; the Doctor and UNIT rubbing each other the wrong way, but eventually pulling together to save the day; a quizzling turncoat who sells out Planet Earth to alien invaders who double-cross him at the last minute; the Doctor using deus ex machina technology to save the Earth with mere seconds to spare... If you'd asked me, in 2004, to imagine what a 21st century regeneration of Doctor Who would look like, this is more or less what I'd have come up with.

The story has had more money thrown at it than it would have done in the Olden Days. The budget runs to hiring halfway decent actors for even minor roles, so Ross-the-squaddie-who's-obviously-going-to-die and radio-operator-lady-who-kisses-the-Colonel-at-the-end come across as characters rather than ballast. And there are lots and lots and lots and lots of extras: the big battle at the end between UNIT and the Sontarans looks like, well, a big battle. Not one of those skirmishes where three Daleks represented an invasion force. And - if you really have so little imagination that this kind of thing bothers you - the "special effects" are "better" than in the old days. But in other respects, this feels a lot like a 2008 take on a 1971 story. If you told me it was based on the long lost Season 9 script, "Terror of the Sontarans", I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

Granted, a real 1970s story wouldn't have contained such big dollops of Archers style touchy feely emoting. But the domestic stuff actually works rather well: because we see her family, Donna remains rooted in her back-story. She's an actual person, albeit one who doesn't act nearly as well as The Mysterious Disembodied Face Who Appears On The TARDIS Monitor To Foreshadow Something Really Big At The End of the Season. (Martha's family never really came properly on-stage which encouraged her to slip into the role of Generic Doctor Who Girl just as much as Peri or Bonni did.) Juxtaposing scenes in the Sontaran space ship with scenes in Donna's Mum's Kitchen makes the space opera stuff seem bigger and more dramatic. I can't think of another example of a TV show which has interleaved Soap Opera and Space Opera in quite this way.

It has faults. I still don't understand what the Doctor was signalling Donna to do with the telephone. David Tennant still garbles important exposition far too quickly - and usually while something is exploding. Unless you are the sort of sad geek who videos the story and re-watches it, you have precious little chance of ever finding out why the Sontaran needed a clone of Martha in the first place.

Like too many Doctor Who stories, old and new, it shows signs of being a not completely viable hybrid. There's a perfectly good story about a group of super-intelligent teenagers who plan to wipe out all life on earth and then decamp to a new planet. And there's a perfectly good story about Sontarans planning to re-model the Earth as a factory for breeding baby Sontarans on. (Very much like the Adipose. And the Pyroviles. Hmm...) But the two halves don't entirely fit together. It isn't clear why the Sontarans need to put gas generating devices into people's cars rather than, say, just dumping them into the atmosphere. It isn't clear why they need something quite so elaborate as Luke Rattigan's genius school to facilitate this. And as ever, the resolution was plucked out of thin, if slightly polluted, air. Of course Rattigan had a Big Red Button which cleanses the earth of all the nasty gas that the evil alien sat navs had pumped into it lying about his lab. Of course you could set fire to the earth's entire atmosphere in a matter of seconds, rather than, say, weeks.

Oh - contrary to what I said in our last thrilling instalment, Luke's academy is co-educational, and the combination of geeky toys and Army Training Corps P.E lessons makes sense once his Evil Masterplan has been revealed. Astonishingly, the real life United Nations seems to have requested that UNIT be renamed the Unified Intelligence Task Force. Figures: the BBC are the only people on earth who pay the slightest attention to the U.N and so far as I know, there wasn't even a special resolution.

But I don't really think any of these details matter. This two part story conveyed the sense that we were watching a Big Space Opera in which the earth was in terrible danger. The fact that the story was taking place on multiple levels -- Luke's academy; the space fleet; UNIT H.Q; Donna's kitchen -- made the whole thing feel much bigger than it actually was. The story believed in itself. The ending surprised me, more or less. The space-ships and the Sontaran army were impressive. The jokes were quite funny. The aliens themselves were well characterized. There was a reference to the Brigadier. This is what we want more of.

That's what's so depressing. Who-fans are clicking their heels with joy; talking about Stratagem/Sky as if it were some kind of triumph -- rather than a bog standard Jon Pertwee earth invasion story with added gloss. I have nothing at all against bog standard Jon Pertwee earth invasion stories. But they shouldn't feel like series highpoints. They should feel like "The sort of story that the Beeb reliably churns out every week." If I feel inclined to greet bread-and-butter as if it was birthday cake you can bet that something has been allowed to go very, very wrong.

APPENDIX: DEPARTMENT OF SPURIOUS SUB-TEXTS

This story is based around a series of structural conflicts. Emotion, represented by families, is regarded as good; the repression of emotion, represented by the military, is regarded as bad. It is also held that intelligence ("cleverness") will lead to the repression of emotion.

Donna finds it reprehensible that the Doctor has turned Martha into a soldier: it is taken for granted that "being a soldier" is a Bad Thing.

Martha appears to concede this point: the Doctor only recognises her as the Old Martha Jones when she says that by working for the military, she might be able to make them "better" – i.e less like the military. The Doctor goes so far as to identify "possessing weapons" with "being the enemy".

Soldiers cannot be bad simply because they kill people. At the end of the story, the Doctor takes on the role of a suicide bomber, purposing to exterminate the entire Sontaran battle fleet. (He would make a good Dalek, as the fellow said.) And they cannot be bad simply because they send people into situations in which they may be killed: the Doctor orders Donna to put her life on the line on the Sontaran spaceship. The difference appears to be that while the Colonel remains detached from the situation, the Doctor emotes about it. He feels guilty about putting Donna at risk; he calls Ross by his name rather than his military call sign; he gives the Sontarans a chance to surrender before wiping them out. Soldiers are bad because they do not express their emotions.

Luke Rattigan is "intelligent". He is also immature (stamping his feet like a toddler when he doesn't get his way), socially inept and physically unattractive. The female girl genius seems more shocked when she hears that Luke wanted to have sex with her than when she found out that he intended to wipe out all life on earth. Luke feels - and the Doctor agrees - that by virtue of his intelligence, he is a natural outsider. He has withdrawn into a commune / school where only other "clever" people are admitted; and hopes to withdraw further onto a completely new planet. Luke's sin, then, is the same as the sin of Colonel Mace: emotional illiteracy. That's why is academy for the super-intelligent is "a bit Hitler Youth" and why he has run into the arms of the super-militaristic Sontarans.

Family is the antithesis of Military. Donna takes time out from saving the earth to visit her family. When Martha indicates that she hasn't bothered to check up on hers, the Doctor knows that she's an evil Sontaran clone. Luke's students walk out on him, not so much because they are shocked by his amorality, as because they want to be with their families during the impending holocaust. Luke's proposed new civilisation won't have any families at all: everything is going to be run according to a breeding programme that he's worked out.

The equation of "intelligence" with "social and sexual inadequacy" and "emotional illiteracy", is very much what lies behind the popular and offensive archetype of the "geek". In order to create his Utopian geek-world of emotion free breeding programmes, Luke has made a pact with the Sontarans. Within the schema of the episode, the Sontarans are the supreme example of the repression of emotion. Having been engaged in a war for 50,000 years, every Sontaran is a soldier, and nothing but a soldier. And, being clones, grown in tanks, they have no familial connections whatsoever. Clearly, this story should have been re-titled "Planet of the Asexuals."

Thursday, May 01, 2008

-- Boy genius. Haven't we seen this character before? Wasn't he in "Dalek"? (Twice?)

-- Sat-nav drives girl reporter off the bridge. Ooo! A ubiquitous consumer device has turned evil. Again. Like the evil alien diet pills. And the evil alien living in the TVs. And the evil alien mobile phones. (Twice.) Can't we have an evil alien daffodil once in a while?

-- Car actually going into river: nice little action movie scene.

-- Martha calls the Doctor home. Hey! That would have been cool, if you hadn't told us it was going to happen a year in advance. And then a week in advance.

-- Martha looks into camera. Leaves blow up and she looks round at TARDIS. Donna seen inside TARDIS, so Doctor has his back to her as he goes to Martha. Don't think we've scene that before. Bit obvious, but nice.

-- Martha and Donna get on really well. The Sarah-Jane plot in Season 2 has set up the expectation that former companions, like former girlfriends, will always quarrel.

-- Unified Intelligence Task Force? Unified? Why? Why? Why?

-- Martha says they are looking for illegal aliens. One of those "joke" things.

-- The Doctor worked for UNIT in the 70s, or was it the 80s. Ho-ho, ha-ha, he-he.

-- What is the POINT of showing us the Sontaran out of shot, and then from behind when we have already been shown what he looks like in last weeks trailer and on the cover of the Radio Times?

-- Squaddies marching down corridor in factory that builds evil alien sat nav. Could we get on with it? Could we get to the Sontarans, please?

-- Squaddies faff around with coffin full of luminous green glue. COULD WE GET ON WITH IT PLEASE?

-- Doctor mucking around with soldiers...feels a lot like, well, a UNIT story.

-- Ooo -- he's taken his helmet off. We see the partial close up of his face. Very nice. Except we saw it in the trailer at the end of the last season and we've ALREADY SCENE THE FULL VIEW IN THE SODDING RADIO SODDING TIMES!

-- "I don't like people with guns", "People with guns are usually the enemy": nice.

-- Donna using her brain to spot the the Clue in the personnel records. Nice. (Using HER brain, as opposed to Rose's brian or a generic companion brain.)

-- Donna tells the Doctor she's going home. Could have been very funny, but so desperately over-done as to be embarrassing.

-- Donna goes home; feels a montage coming on. (NOTE: She's seen a lot of weird stuff, but her mother was in a pub where alien jelly babies were breaking out of people's tummies.)

-- Ah: they are treating Donna's family more as a soap opera than a sit com this week. Bernard Cribbens is a lot better than he was in the first episode. Positively good scene.

-- School for geniuses. (Is that the same building as the school in "Human Nature".) Are there any girl geniuses? (Does RTD like stories about boys boarding schools, for some unaccountable reason?) Why is it "a bit Hitler youth" rather than all geeky and nerdy? Lab where everyone is experimenting is awfully old fashioned? Wouldn't boy genii mainly be working on computers?

-- Toys lying around in Rattigan's room, obviously meant to to evoke Google and other laid back IT companies: doesn't fit in very well with Hitler youth and early morning runs.

-- YOU GOT IN THE CAR, YOU BIG CLOT, EVEN THOUGH YOU KNOW IT'S GOT AN EVIL ALIEN SAT NAV IN IT.

-- The Sontaran walks through the teleport and into the space-ship followed by the genius kid. This is the first moment this season -- no, the first moment EVER -- when I (almost unconsciously) think "Hey! I'm watching Doctor Who."

-- Sontaran and kid looking out over earth through window of spaceship. Admittedly, the same scene was done in -- "End of the World", other places as well -- but very nice.

-- Would the Sontarans really know the Doctor as a one of their enemies? "Time Warrior" and "Sontaran Experiment" (and "Two Doctors" come to think of it, must have erased that from my memory) must be pretty minor encounters. I suppose they blame him for their invasion of Gallifrey failing. Odd that a race mad enough to invade Gallifrey wasn't involved with the Time War. Sorry. Having a geek moment.

-- Pull back from window to Sontaran fleet. OK, Babylon 5 was proud that it could do this ten years ago, but it still looks cool. Nice spaceships, too.

-- Doctor convinces the alien sat nav not to drive them into the river by ordering it to drive them into the river. A bit like Spock making alien computers blow up by feeding them simple paradoxes! But, quite fun that it stops on the very edge of the river and then fizzles out.

-- The realistic soap opera - Donna, Gramps and her mother - works very well as a brief interlude to off-set the space opera rather than the main event. The whole scene with them round the car is really very nice indeed.

-- I like the Sontaran's little beard. Only just noticed that.

-- Loads of Sontarans and loads of Sontaran spaces ships. I love it.

-- Sontar-ha, Sontar-ha. You see that almost imperceptible dot on the horizon? That's Russell T Davies' sense of good taste, tht is.

-- Apart from the fact that Gramps was stupid enough to jump in the car, that's really a very good cliffhanger.